I would like to provide a simple and practical solution as a small example of implementing a Human-Oriented Approach for PR measurement and PR management that I have been developing for PR agencies, press offices, election campaign offices, etc. I present this solution in four main statements.

In the European Communication Monitor 2013 document [1] there was set a number of the most important issues for communication management until 2016. One of the high priority issues was ‘Building and maintaining trust’. But you cannot possibly do this successfully without effective measurement.

Trust is a complex psychological (cognitive and affective) concept which is difficult to describe. A great academic review particular as it relates to the effective practice of public relations can be found in the Institute for Public Relations (IPR) document [2]. Various authors point a great number of characteristics, layers and even dimensions of the trust (e.g. integrity, dependability, competence). They consider cognitive-based trust which based on rational thought and affect-based trust based on the emotional connection of the relationship, and specify two types of trust: general-attitudinal and specific-situational. All these definitions increase our understanding of the trust phenomenon but make its measurement look a daunting task.

I would like to provide a simple and practical solution as a small example of implementing a human-oriented approach for PR measurement and PR management that I have been developing for PR agencies, press offices, election campaign offices, etc. I present this solution in four main statements.

My first statement/assumption is: if you maintain a specific-situational trust in your every PR campaign you can finally build a general-attitudinal trust to your organization in the long-term relationship. This is the first preliminary step of making measurement simpler.

International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC) suggested the following diagram as a simple view of some PR campaign.

You tell your story or some key message and try to make your target audience to trust your story or your key message, which are subjects of your PR campaign. Here you deal with a specific-situational trust. If you gain trust every time than finally you and your organization become trusted in general, as a result of long-term relationship. At this point you already deal with general-attitudinal trust. This diagram also shows that you can build and maintain trust with your intermediary third party in the same way you do it with your target audience.

My second and most important statement is: by implementing a concept of so called comparative measurement you can avoid many complications of measuring trust. The idea of comparative measurement can be easily explained in the following example. It is very difficult (almost impossible) to determine what is the perfect handwriting. But it is very easy to compare which one of two handwritings is better.

For PR practice it means that you even don’t have to go deep into the trust phenomenon. What you need is just to ask respondents from your target audience which one of two alternatives ‘I trust this message’ or ‘I don’t trust this message’ is more preferable. You get trust if the first alternative is more preferable and don’t get trust vice versa. By summarizing answers you get a mutual opinion of your target audience. You can even measure a level of trust if you set some score scale and determine a difference in preference between two alternatives. By using a level of trust you can plan and monitor your PR campaign and determine whether to continue a PR campaign or to stop it.

Comparative measurement significantly increases measurability of the whole PR process when you cannot measure human activities in some absolute numbers. At the same time you can improve your results by combining individual preferences with statistics collected as a result of various surveys or during social media monitoring.

My third statement is: to provide better accuracy of measuring trust do it frequently on regular basis, as you think it is reasonable for your PR campaign.Thanks to social media you can do measurement constantly and in real time.If you measure frequently you can further allow yourself to avoid many complications of measuring trust. The more iterations you do the more precisely you get to your terminal goal.

Considering Valid Measurement Framework (VMF) [3] of PR campaign, what would be the right place for Trust in the sequence of communication stages: Awareness, Understanding, Interest and Support?

And here is my fourth statement: you cannot support without trust, you should not trust without understanding, and if interest is similar to consideration than better to consider information before you trust. In the result you get VMF with one additional communication stage Trust, between Interest and Support stages.

You can easily extend this comparative measurement concept for measuring other PR communication stages: Awareness, Understanding, Interest and Support. Just set for comparison the following natural alternatives: ‘I am aware’ and ‘I am not aware’, ‘I understand’ and ‘I don’t understand’, etc.

In future I would also suggest to use a concept ‘Cognitive/Affective State’ instead of ‘Communication Stage’. It would divert PR practitioners at the very beginning from measuring outputs to measuring outtakes and outcomes, inspire the search for more clear human criteria of reaching any given stage of PR communication and provide more flexibility in setting PR campaign objectives. For example, trust has its trust counterpart — suspicion. Considering trust counterpart as an opposite cognitive state you can plan a PR campaign with opposite to trust goal: i.e. develop suspicion to some idea, project, fact or statement. In this case you will make measurement by setting preference between alternatives ‘I do suspect’ and ‘I don’t suspect’.

At the last (June, 2014) International AMEC Summit on Measurement in Amsterdam Prof. Jim Macnamara [4] drew once again PR community attention to the human aspects of PR communication and said about PR measurement deadlock. It is clear that you cannot break the deadlock without making your metrics more relevant to the subject of research, namely human attitudes, opinions, motives, intentions, etc. Finally public and target audiences are those who “evaluate” our PR campaigns.